Dr Prescott will also tell academic and business delegates at the White Rose Bioscience Forum in York today (31 October), that whilst venture capitalists (VCs) have their eye on the potential high returns of such an emergent market, they will remain wary of investing until key broader issues such as legal, regulatory and intellectual property complexities have been resolved.

For young companies, a major hurdle is a lack of support from the pharmaceutical industry for cell-based therapeutic product development. “Traditionally, pharma have supported products coming through the biotech industry through licensing and partnering, providing support for clinical trials, financing and expertise,” says Dr Prescott. “But this is generally not the case here; they are tending to support enabling technologies and research-based reagents and tools instead.”

According to Dr Prescott, the reticence to support cell-based therapy development is because the end product will usually be tailored to the individual patient, with delivery within a clinical setting, administered by specialists. “This requires a very different business model from that of traditional high volume distribution of drugs routinely available to the patient,” she says.

She continues: “If that crucial support is not there from the pharma industry, young companies need to think very hard about whether they realistically have the expertise to take a product to market on their own.”

There’s not much good news in terms of funding available to young companies either, says Dr Prescott: “There’s simply less seed and early stage money to go round at the moment. Investment trends across Europe show a general decline in VC activity, and of the money invested, the majority of it is used to continue to support the more mature biotech companies. In addition, this may also impact on the ability of early stage companies to raise match funding required by many Government grant schemes.”

For VCs, patent issues are also a major cause for concern with dominating patents already granted covering methods of isolating, cultivating, differentiating and delivering stem cell lines. “Young companies need to be very careful that they have the freedom to operate, and where they need to buy-in technology, commercial licenses can cost as much as $100k, which is out of the range of most younger biotech companies, “ says Dr Prescott.

“VCs are also wary that for the embryonic stem cell-based products, the European market may remain fragmented despite the proposal for an EU-wide regulatory framework for advanced stem cell therapies published by the Commission for EU Communities. The proposal respects national confidence on the use of stem cells. This means that a product approved for launch in the UK may need work to be approved in other EU countries, which impacts on cost and time.” she explains.

“I appreciate that this is a hard message, but it’s a tough climate. The most pragmatic advice I can give to young companies is to show venture capitalists that they have anticipated, understood and determined a route forward to resolve key hurdles facing them,” she says. “This will underpin the success of UK biotech companies whose technology expertise lies in stem cell therapeutics.”

Die letzten 5 Focus-News des innovations-reports im Überblick:

Controlling electronic current is essential to modern electronics, as data and signals are transferred by streams of electrons which are controlled at high speed. Demands on transmission speeds are also increasing as technology develops. Scientists from the Chair of Laser Physics and the Chair of Applied Physics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) have succeeded in switching on a current with a desired direction in graphene using a single laser pulse within a femtosecond ¬¬ – a femtosecond corresponds to the millionth part of a billionth of a second. This is more than a thousand times faster compared to the most efficient transistors today.

At the productronica trade fair in Munich this November, the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT will be presenting Laser-Based Tape-Automated Bonding, LaserTAB for short. The experts from Aachen will be demonstrating how new battery cells and power electronics can be micro-welded more efficiently and precisely than ever before thanks to new optics and robot support.

Fraunhofer ILT from Aachen relies on a clever combination of robotics and a laser scanner with new optics as well as process monitoring, which it has developed...

Plants and algae use the enzyme Rubisco to fix carbon dioxide, removing it from the atmosphere and converting it into biomass. Algae have figured out a way to increase the efficiency of carbon fixation. They gather most of their Rubisco into a ball-shaped microcompartment called the pyrenoid, which they flood with a high local concentration of carbon dioxide. A team of scientists at Princeton University, the Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford University and the Max Plank Institute of Biochemistry have unravelled the mysteries of how the pyrenoid is assembled. These insights can help to engineer crops that remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while producing more food.

Our brains house extremely complex neuronal circuits, whose detailed structures are still largely unknown. This is especially true for the so-called cerebral cortex of mammals, where among other things vision, thoughts or spatial orientation are being computed. Here the rules by which nerve cells are connected to each other are only partly understood. A team of scientists around Moritz Helmstaedter at the Frankfiurt Max Planck Institute for Brain Research and Helene Schmidt (Humboldt University in Berlin) have now discovered a surprisingly precise nerve cell connectivity pattern in the part of the cerebral cortex that is responsible for orienting the individual animal or human in space.